Biography
Lidija Kostic Khachatourian is the founder of AKKA Project and one of Dubai's most prominent advocates for contemporary African art — a career she arrived at by an unlikely route. She studied and practised federal accounting in Switzerland, a world of numbers and deadlines, before moving to Dubai in 2008 with her husband Kristian to focus on family. It was there that she fell in love with art, turning a personal passion for the African continent and its art into a profession. In 2016 she opened AKKA Project in Dubai, followed by a Venice space in 2019, and has since become a recognised curatorial voice — she curated the Mozambican Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Over more than a decade she has operated with what observers describe as a quiet, deliberate consistency, centring African and diasporic artists within a model rooted in care and continuity rather than market pressure, and is regularly cited among the cultural advocates reshaping the global South's place in the contemporary art world.